Yahoo! is taking the lead role in enabling the global mobile ecosystem to bring compelling mobile Internet experiences to consumers. Yahoo! delivers its services throughout the world from its own network as well as through partnerships with mobile operators and device manufacturers around the world. Yahoo! recently opened up the company’s mobile platform to allow the world’s developers and publishers to mobilize their own offerings.
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Traditionally, Microsoft’s core business has been focused on the Windows platform and the Office suite. Windows and Office, by all means, continue to be the heart of Microsoft. The latest versions of the flagship products, Windows Vista and the Office 2007 System, made available to the public at the end of January 2007, have fueled the vast majority of the company’s most recent fiscal second quarter record financial results of $16.37 billion in revenue, and $6.48 billion in operating income. With Office SP1 out of the way at the end of 2007, Microsoft is currently building Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows XP Service Pack 3 and Windows 7 client platforms, as well as putting the finishing touches on Windows Server 2008.
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Whether we like it or not the technology and culture of Web 2.0 is something all businesses should take note of – but as usual businesses are left trying to work out how it all affects them. To offer some guidance through simple explanation of the technology and 5 Ideas where real issues can be addressed, this white paper goes some way towards clearing the way for businesses to work with Web 2.0.
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Modern Geographical Information Systems (GIS) [1] provide a service-oriented architecture for interacting with geographical data sets and related maps. Web-based GIS systems are architected around the same principles as more general Web service systems based on SOAP [2], WSDL [3], and REST. Mirroring the World Wide Web Consortium and OASIS Web service standards-making bodies, the Open Geospatial Consortium [5] defines open standards for messages, XML data formats, and access protocols that are specific to the GIS community. In addition to OGC-based services, there are many companies (such as ESRI and AutoDesk) that provide proprietary, commercial solutions. Services from these various providers are not normally interoperable.
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The Human Interactions in Programming (HIP) team in Microsoft Research applies human- centered research techniques to builds tools that improve the software development process. The joke goes, “we build tools as if software were made by people … working together.” As a human-centered effort, we draw from various research fields including human-computer interaction, information visualization, computer-supported cooperative work, and social computing. The central tenet of these fields is that one needs to understand the user in order to design tools to support them. To this end we have initiated a series of investigations to understand software development at Microsoft. Our research builds on a rich history of research into professional software development practices [1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7]. This document describes the process we used, what we learned, and directions for future user research.

METHODOLOGY
We performed two surveys and several face-to-face interviews of developers at Microsoft during the summer of 2005. The first survey contained 205 questions asking how developers spend their time, what tools they use, and the severity of various problems they face. We deployed it to 1000 architects, software developers and software test developers randomly selected from the Microsoft address book by job title. We received 157 responses, though the data presented here includes only the 104 responses from the developers.

Next we performed semi-structured interviews with six software development leads and five software developers drawn from our survey respondents. Each was done by two interviewers, who took copious notes. Each interview lasted about an hour. Most were recorded on audio. To find the themes latent in the notes we transcribed them onto 800 3×5” cards and did a massive card sort exercise.

Download pdf Software Development at Microsoft Observed

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Open source software (OSS) is both a philosophy and a process. As a philosophy it describes the intended use of software and methods for its distribution. Depending on your perspective, the concept of OSS is a relatively new idea being only five or ten years old. On the other hand, the GNU Software Project — a project advocating the distribution of “free” software — has been operational since the mid ‘80’s. Consequently, the ideas behind OSS have been around longer than you may think. When people think about OSS they often think about “free”, but the term “free” should be equated with freedom, and as such people who use “free” software should be:
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Iptablesrocks was created to provide a publicly available, easy to understand guide and tutorial for the installation and configuration of iptables. Iptables is a linux package for managing IPv4 (and optionally IPv6) packet filtering and NAT (Network Address Translation). Iptables can be configured to function as a firewall, a NAT mechanism, a packet filter or all 3 at once. The diversity of capabilities possible with iptables makes it a secure, stable and economical alterative to hardware based firewalls and routers or costly 3rd party firewall software. Iptables can also serve as a rendundant firewall in conjunction with a hardware firewall, providing you with an extra layer of security. Iptablesrocks.org covers the installation of iptables in a Redhat environment, the syntax and structure associated with iptables and a collection a pre-configured iptables configurations for a variety of applications. This site is currently under development. Enjoy!

When running a typical web server, you need a firewall that is secure and offers protection, but you also need one that allows all needed traffic to be able to enter and leave the server so that your server’s day to day operations can carry on unimpeded. This particular iptables configuration does the following:
1. Uses the “mangle” portion of the table to effectively block and/or confuse most port scans. These rules deal address FIN,SYN,RST,PSH,ACK,URG FIN,PSH and URG methods.
2. Establishes a locked down and secure foundation by initially blocking all incoming, outgoing and forwarded packets COMPLETELY.
3. With all incoming packets dropped by default, it then grants incoming access to a select number of ports. These ports are ports that a typical web server might allow. Open inbound ports include: 20 & 21 (ftp), 22 (ssh), 25 (smtp), 53 (dns), 80 (http), 110 (pop), 143 (imap), 443 (https), 993 (imaps)
4. With all outbound packets dropped by default, it then grants outbound access to a select number of ports. These ports are posts that a typical web server might allow. Open outbound ports include: 20 & 21 (ftp), 22 (ssh), 25 (smtp), 43 (whois), 53 (dns), 80 (http), 110 (pop), 143 (imap), 443 (https), 993 (imaps)
5. Both inbound and outbound connections are required to be in a “related and established” state. The “related and established” state requirement will require you to add the “ip_conntrack_ftp” module into your server’s configuration. This is typically done with the following command: insmod ip_conntrack_ftp
6. ICMP packet types 3, 8 and 11 are dropped by default for all inbound traffic. This makes your server unpingable and reduces the chance of ping ICMP based attacks. Pings are allowed for all outbound traffic.
7. Unauthorized inbound and outbound traffic is logged.

Download pdf An iptables guide & tutorial

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SQL - Structured Query Language
Structured Query Language, is a computer language designed for retrieval and management of data in relational database management systems database schema creation and modification database object access control management.
History:
The first version of SQL was developed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce in the early 1970s. Standardized in 1986 by ANSI. Subsequent versions of the SQL standard have been released as ISO standards
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